


Karkat: Wait

by nya_chan



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-22
Updated: 2011-12-12
Packaged: 2017-10-17 04:58:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/173143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nya_chan/pseuds/nya_chan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Doomed timeline AU nonsense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She clings to you, sobbing. You put an arm around her because it's the right thing to do. You kind of wish someone could do the same for you, but they can't. They're all dead, except for you two. It's a wonder you're not crying either.

You're the leader, dammit. One of you has to be strong. She can't.

You don't even understand how things went so wrong. You guess your leadership wasn't enough, but at least Aradia got out. She always does. You hope that the alpha versions of yourselves fare better, because honestly you'd be ashamed to find yourself in this position in any other timeline, with her leaving green stains on your shirt and you trying your damndest not to leave red stains on the top of her hat.

She sniffles weakly a couple times and the flow of tears starts to slow as she realizes that they won't bring any of them back. It's just the two of you now, and you have to support each other. She looks up at you pitifully, face streaked with green.

"Where do we go from here?" you ask.

-

You two have the whole planet to yourselves, and all the other planets too, if you want. Except for the imps, but compared to the adversaries you _could_ have, those don't seem even remotely like threats. Noisy neighbours at best. Minor nuisances, nothing more.

But she's wholly dependent on you. She lost all that she had before, all other means of support. So did you, but you were always a bit of a loner. Even though you should be supporting each other, you're her foundation. She couldn't get by without you. She thinks you don't know this, but you do.

It makes you uncomfortable.

She likes you far more than you could ever like her. She claims to love you, but you aren't convinced that that's actually what this is. It's too soon, too desperate.

You explain this to her, tell her you're sorry. She sighs.

"That's okay, Karkitty," she tells you. "I can wait."

That makes you even more uncomfortable.

-

You start to rebuild, making the planet livable again, at least for the two of you. It's not the rebuilding the game wanted you to do, but it doesn't matter. You've already lost, so the two of you invent your own post-game. You decide to ignore the gates, because travelling to the other worlds would only remind you too much of your friends that aren't around anymore in this timeline.

Sometimes when you're trying to sleep you hear her crying in her room, whimpering about her lusus, her moirail, her unrequited love. Every time you want to go to her, but you worry that she'll get the wrong impression. That she'll become _too_ dependent on you--more than she already is. Instead you lie awake and stare at the ceiling. You've adjusted to sleeping without a recuperacoon, but it's still too weird, too alien.

Every night she wakes up and claims to be fine, but you don't have to see the dark, growing circles under her eyes to know that she's not. She always tackles you playfully when you ask and says you it's silly of you to worry, that she's purrfectly okay. You tell her that you hope she's not lying.

Because honestly at this point you're not sure if you could survive without her either.

-

You keep each other sane. You're like moirails, almost. But rather than one party keeping the other stable, you both need each other to prevent either of you from going off the deep end. You've been through a lot together, and there's no telling where the future will take you. The memos have stopped, you don't message yourself from the future anymore. You start to miss your future self. At least he'd give you someone to argue with. You can't fight with her.

-

This doesn't feel like life anymore. You're convinced that something terrible is going to happen soon, that one of the game's fail-safes will finally kick in to rid itself of this doomed timeline. It can't have you clogging up paradox space; there are more important timelines. _Correct_ timelines.

You wish you belonged to one of those.

But you don't.

She senses your distress and is so gogdamned _clingy_ now. You tell her to stop but she won't listen. Maybe it's her coping mechanism. She can't lose you too. You hate to admit it, but you don't want to lose her either. But you do wish she would give you some space.

"Not until you cheer up!" she tells you, smiling way too much.

You try to tell her that you don't want to, but she refuses to listen. It's a lost cause.

Just like your existence.

-

Her head is on your shoulder. She's crying and you don't really know why--it's just something she does now, frequently. It used to get on your nerves, but you just accept it. You've always been the weak one, the sappy one, the hopeless romantic. She used to be strong. How did your roles change?

But something inside you breaks and suddenly you don't feel so strong anymore either. You kiss her forehead, not realizing what you've done before it's too late. For a second she glares at you, hurt, but then she turns away, her face a deep green.

"Where do we go from here?" she asks, still not looking at you.

"Nowhere," you say.

-

She's clingier than ever, but not exactly happy about it. It's a frustrated, determined clinginess instead. After that one moment of weakness, you went back to being how you were before. She's looking for something in you that she can't find anymore, but it's probably still there, deep, deep below the surface.

You doubt it's within your grasp anymore either.

-

She doesn't cry during the day anymore. You'd grown accustomed to the noise, and now that it's gone, it's harder to sleep. Strangely, now that she isn't crying, the urge to go to her is stronger than ever, and you can't fight it. You go into her room and fall asleep beside her, back to back. She's confused when she wakes, but she doesn't question it. You're glad, because you don't have an answer.

It becomes a habit, and eventually you stop using your own room altogether. You're still cold to her during the night, no matter how determinedly she sticks to your side. For some reason her body heat doesn't warm you then, even though it does when you're trying to sleep. You just can't see your relationship becoming as flushed as she wants it to be. You want it to be paler than that, but you will never be her perfect moirail.

-

And yet you keep kissing her. It's usually harmless and benign places: forehead, cheek, paws (no, _hands_ ). But the first time you kissed her on the lips, she slapped you. Each time after that she returned it, but you could tell she wasn't fully willing.

"Do you love me?" you ask.

"Yes," she replies quietly. Usually her eyes are locked on your face whenever you talk. Now they're not.

"Okay."

That day she cried herself to sleep. You could have turned around to comfort her, but you didn't.

-

You continue to drift through this thing that can barely be considered an existence. You want some other relationship than the confused one you have with her. She's looking for matespritship. You're not, though your actions say otherwise. But your words are honest. The least you can do is keep your words honest. That's all you can do for her, really. She still needs you and you still need her.

You sense that there is some part of you, somewhere, that can one day return her love. But the rest of you knows that she isn't the best fit for that quadrant. You're still hoping for the kind of red romance found in movies. But romance like that doesn't happen in real life, and you really don't have any other options.

And the waiting is making her absolutely _sick_ and you can see it. It isn't fair at all of you to do this to her, to say one thing and do another. You can't stop kissing her but you really should. You know that you should just give in and say _I love you_ but you don't want to lie.

But it might hurt both of you less.

That day you sleep facing her back and put one arm over her. Her shoulders shake tellingly, but her tears are silent.

-

"I can wait," she had told you.

But she can't. You're the only one who can.


	2. Chapter 2

She's the one who starts to lose it first. She starts to reconstruct her shipping wall. At first, it was confined to her room, but eventually it spreads to the rest of the block. You assume that it's mostly ships she's already illustrated before, but then you notice that they all revolve around the two of you, mostly just you. You have to wonder if it's relationships she actually sees as plausible or simply relationships that she _wants_ to see as plausible. Karkat  <3< Terezi. Karkat <3< Sollux. Karkat <3< Gamzee. Karkat <3< Jack. It's like she's in denial that you could possibly have even the palest of relationships with anyone but her.

Karkat <3 Nepeta.

Karkat <3 Nepeta is everywhere, all over the block, inside and outside. Some days, while she's sleeping, you go around and turn all of her hearts into diamonds. It's stupid and pointless and doesn't really do anything because she always changes them back. But there's nothing else to do here other than wage this silent war with her.

You try to confront her about this, but she doesn't have an answer. Not one that you like, anyway. She just looks desperate and lost and tells you, "The voices. The clawful voices won't go away."

That's when you start to worry. Voices were never a good thing. They'd done nothing to help Sollux or Aradia. You've already lost them (well, more like Aradia had lost you two), and you didn't want to lose her. That would be clawful. Fuck, no. Awful.

You want to know how to fix her. You wonder if reciprocating her feelings--even if you were just pretending--would work. But that would be dishonest and the last thing you want to do is lie to her. You'd never be able to forgive yourself for that.

There's some ancient memory inside you, like a dream lingering half-forgotten on the edges of your consciousness, that desperately wants to be with her, but you're pretty sure that memory isn't yours. You'd blame dream bubbles or weird time shit, but you never slept while the game was still playable. You never visited a dream bubble. Your dreamself died before it awoke, you guess, because you've never seen Prospit. You don't know what happened to it, but you assume that it was destroyed when your timeline went horribly wrong. Now when you dream you're always just sitting in a black abyss, waiting. Waiting for what, you don't know.

But you can guess. Both sleeping and waking, you've been waiting for some sort of sign that the end is coming. That this botched timeline will be erased and will stop clogging valuable real estate in paradox space.

There's a tacit understanding between you and her that this isn't going to last forever. Maybe that's why she's so desperate for you to return her feelings. Maybe she's looking for closure before you die. But if that's the case, you _definitely_ don't want to lie to her. You don't want to be stuck with the feeling of self-loathing that that would give you, and you don't want her to be forced to exist in a false reality. You wish that you were the only one she had to listen to.

What a strange thing to wish for.

You haven't said anything nice to her in weeks. She hasn't looked at you in the eye for even longer. Why would you want to be the only thing she interacts with?

The ancient part of you that you can't quite remember doesn't completely hate this situation. It likes being with her, even though present-day you is a complete asshole. But these _aren't your memories_ and you want to know how they got in your head.

The next day, while you're dreaming, you try to be a more active participant. Rather than sit there and wait, you look around. You listen.

What you thought was blackness before is actually a mass of shadowy shapes. They move and flow so subtly that you can't tell whether or not your eyes are just playing tricks on you or if there's actually something out there.

It sets you on edge. You don't feel like yourself anymore.

Her shipping wall has blanketed the entire block. It covers the walls and windows. It's scratched into the dirt of the lawn ring. During the night she goes out and kills imps for ink. She ran out of chalk ages ago. Formerly, all the drawings had been color coded based on what type of relationship they were. Now everything is Karkat <3 Nepeta, and all the hearts are black. There is something horrifying about the disconnect between the color and the symbol that disturbs you more than you should. But there're whispers in your dreams and you don't have the energy to focus on this silly girl's drawings, no matter how much they bother you.

You ask what the voices say to her. She shakes her head instead of answering. You ask if she's okay. "I'm perfectly fine!" she snaps, which is the final sign that something is wrong. She's not herself anymore.

"You love me, don't you?" she asks. You hesitate, but tell her "no." You still can't lie to her.

She stormed away after that. The next night, all the hearts had been turned into spades.

-

You feel anxious all the time now. She's usually gone, but the whispers never leave you alone. They start to form words, then sentences, then paragraphs. "He loved her," they insist. "He loved her. He loved her. You're not like him. He helped them. You're not like him. You're terrible. He loved her."

Instinctively you know they're talking about the memory-that-isn't-yours. But you ignore the voices. They are merely a soundtrack to your dreams. Nothing important.

Until you actually start to listen to them.

They wouldn't let you ignore them any longer. They became insistent, and you couldn't help but listen.

He loved her he loved her he loved her.

You bite your finger and begin to trace red hearts over all the spades.

She comes back in the morning to find someone that looks like you curled up on the floor, dizzy from blood loss. But he isn't you. You don't know who he is. You've never met him; you'd never even heard of him until the voices started. But he's there on the floor of the block and she's hovering over him and as you look up at her, you want to reach out to her somehow. You want to apologize. But you can't speak. You can't even move.

She leaves you there and never returns.

-

You sleep all the time. You feel less alone that way. He's lost something vital, and you hate him for waking up and ruining everything like this. You realize now that the gods from the Furthest Ring are the ones pestering you, ruining your like this. Are they the ones who want you gone? Or are they merely one of countless other methods that paradox space employs to rid itself of stragglers? You were hoping for explosions. For a quick and sudden end to it all. You'd hoped that the two of you could at least be together. But their strategy was more subtle. They weren't going to destroy you. They would make you destroy yourself.

But why did they talk to her first? Maybe it was because she'd talked to them before while on Derse. Maybe it's because she needed someone to talk to. Someone who would listen, unlike you. And now that you actually need her, she's gone.

"Did she die?" you ask them.

"Yes," they respond.

You don't know if you should believe them, but you do. She's dead, you decide, and you're the one who killed her. It's the only possible thing that could have happened. You knew it had to happen somehow. Both of you would have to die eventually. Perhaps paradox space had taken pity on you at let you live for a while longer, but this was crueler than a quick death. You haven't felt alive in perigees, and you don't even know who you are anymore.

At some point, you knew that all you had to do was wait, and everything would sort itself out. You thought you'd be able to bide your time until then. You thought waiting wouldn't be an issue.

You can't wait any longer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought I was done with this when I wrote the first chapter, but then ancestor stuff happened and I got ideas and then suddenly this. I'm still not sure a continuation was even necessary, but oh well!
> 
> I changed a little bit of the first chapter (nothing major) to give it a bit more chronology/setting. ...Okay, all I did was change it so that there was no reference to the humans, since they hadn't met/created them yet.


End file.
